Editor Note - This post was written in September 2020. It had some great shock and awe value, but I don’t feel like that was fair to Big Farm. I have rewritten the first half of the post in December 2024.

Welcome to Big Farm Mobile Harvest! This is a unique game that offers many qualities that set it apart from other games and I think you will be happy that you chose to play it. There are many different strategies that you can use to play this game, choosing to take a more personal, blended or community approach to your farm. There are tons of events and competitions for players of every level, and you get to pick the effort or amount of playing time you want to put forth.

But you didn't click this post because you want the fluffy stuff. You want to know how to succeed and flourish in this game. This is not a light post to read, but a few of the top players in the game have said they wish it existed when they started playing.

Games exist to make money for the developer. It is a business. As such, you will see ads, subscriptions and packages to purchase along the way.

Big Farm Mobile Harvest is balanced for you to not feel successful. You will always be behind where the game wants you to be, and where you feel you should be. You will never have enough products to satisfy the market demand, or materials to upgrade and expand. This encourages you to keep going and improving, but more importantly, because there is always a nudge to purchase solutions. The game is structured to dampen your progress and manipulate perception and assumption to encourage spending. Lots of revenue is generated when you feel like a failure and buy solutions.

I’m not saying don’t spend anything. I know hundreds of players that have found great satisfaction and pleasure with Big Farm, ranging from completely free to play, a few bucks, to monthly budgets.

Big Farm makes most of its money when you feel like you're failing. The key to success is defining your own success and goals.

This is where you can’t follow the game dialog, design, and quests with blind faith, because it is just there as a ‘guide’. It makes for inefficient farms and frustrated players. 

Whether you want to have a relaxing escape and harvest corn with friends on a Friday night, or invest into an absolutely monster farm to challenge for tournament titles, you need to understand where and how the game tries to hinder your farm. You can use alternative strategies to succeed or know that it is simply part of the game and you shouldn't worry about falling short of where they want you to be. Backed by logic and math, we encourage people to do the best they can within the game design.  

Once you appreciate this concept, it is relatively easy to farm smart, and with a little patience and realistic definition of success, you can build a great farm and find lots of enjoyment in this game.

The best place to go from here is the game balance you can control. I don’t have that written yet, so enjoy the rest of this post as it walks through some of the game's quirks and I continue to expand content.

Before we start looking at some game elements, Big Farm once asked on their Facebook page what advice you would give to your younger self and then promised to feature the common ones. The community overwhelmingly said ignore the blue book. The blue book is used to give you tasks and quests to complete around the farm. While it does serve some purpose to notify you when new upgrades are unlocked or weekly theme event process, it largely exists to slowly hinder your farm. Big Farm responded by saying the book was more of a guide. In all honesty, there was no easy way out of that one and they have not interacted with the community since.

Let's look at some game elements.

Level 5, quest to buy a package. Most games will bombard you with packages, but it is simply amazing how many people buy one because it is presented as a task that you can’t make disappear. 

• You don’t have to complete a task. It can sit in the book forever and will not affect the game play in any way. I have 30+ tasks still in my book and most will never get finished
• It is the only quest without a completion timer that will eventually disappear.
• It can be hard to condition yourself to not complete tasks.

Quests/tasks to expand your farm.

• These quests appear before you are at a high enough level to actually buy the expansion, but you can use gold to bypass being level locked. If you do use gold to buy the locked expansion, the next one appears immediately.   
• Never buy land at full price. It is usually 50% off or better once a week.

Level 5 to 11 gives you a succession of tasks that you need to do but can’t truly succeed at. 

• Don’t worry about it. I unpack them further down.
• The game starts to flow better when you can upgrade your mill to level 2 and 3. You will notice that they always introduce a new animal to feed before the mill can be upgraded, so you have extra mouths and upgrade downtime to contend with.

Idle buildings take up workers and space. Both are limited, extremely valuable resources. Big Farm loves idle buildings and wasted workers! The blue quest/task book will guide you to build an unbalanced farm with lots of idle buildings and unbalanced supply chain.  

• The more active your farm is, the faster and stronger it grows. Ideally, you want to be ready to supply the next build before you build it, like having enough fields to feed another cow, or producing enough fertilizer to build another orchard.
• Orchards are the engine of your farm economy, but they are a hindrance without fertilizer. (Stables -> Dung -> Fertilizer -> Orchards -> Money) You will struggle and struggle with fertilizer. The game will want more orchards than you can support. At the start of the game, you will need 4 animals for every orchard to keep them running. It may be wiser to hold off adding a cherry until you have enough stables to keep fertilizer coming in.  
• A common misconception is that upgrading the (half idle) silo will fix your problems. The problem is not the processing, but the input (dung). Invest workers into producing more dung. That will give you more dung, cash, materials and co-op points. Sizing your silo is covered under most efficient building levels.
• Level 5 you build a silo. You can’t fill it. Level 6 you build an apple. After 3 runs, you won’t have the fertilizer to keep it going. You need the apple to get real cash and materials coming in, so don’t worry about it sitting idle waiting for fertilizer. You will have the ability to build (stables) over the next 10 levels to fix that.

Level 7, build a composter that takes twice as long to fill as it does to run, and the return is dismal.

• It takes up workers, sits empty half of the day and the return will give you 20-30 extra wheat (Level 14+) per day. Save the composter till level 39 when efficient housing is unlocked and you have 4-5 orchards to keep it full.

Level 8 -> build a pig. 

• Pigs are the most inefficient feed chain in the game. The problem is not the pigs itself (they will play an important role in growing your farm), but the fact that your mill cannot produce enough feed for all of your animals until level 11. The solutions – buy a package or idle stables. Idle stables means idle silo and idle orchards. Idle farm means low income, low materials and slow growth.
• This is one where if you know it is going to happen, you won’t worry about it. Either you play 2 out of every 3 hours of the day, have hungry chickens or hungry pigs. This is where doing fast tasks when you are on the game, and longer tasks when you are away from the game, becomes a valuable lesson. You come back to your farm with cabbage in the fields and hungry pigs. If you start milling pig feed, you can’t do corn and chicken feed. You don’t utilize the time you do have on the farm. Leave the pigs hungry. Do corn and then plant cabbage and mill pig feed when you step away from the game again. Next time you come back, you will have cabbage, pig feed, time to make chicken feed and the supplies you need when you step away. You farm will run much smoother after your pigs starve once and you prepare and process longer tasks at the same time when you are away from the game. (Same for wheat and cow feed overnight.)

Level 9 -> Join a co-op. 

• At level 9 you have no idea what a co-op is and the book never guides you to chat, help with a project, read the co-op notes; nothing to help you succeed. Check out the getting started post.
• The bigger problem is that you don’t know what a bad co-op is and too many people get hurt in a bad co-op. Read my short intro to co-ops in the getting started guide.

Gold and fancy items are really cheap to start. They get expensive really quick. You do not get anything back when you bulldoze them.

• All three tricks are a manipulation of sunken cost fallacy (pot committed) - a cognitive phenomenon where people remain committed to a choice, even when a clear alternative choice is better, because of time, effort, or money already invested*. You don’t want to lose the limited and “valuable” resources you have, so you get stuck with low level fancy buildings or spending real money to continue.  *https://med.umn.edu/news-events/sticking-wrong-choice

The blue book will want you to build 10 houses when you can do it with 6. 

• This takes up at least 3 expansions of space when you consider happiness needed to offset the houses.
• Upgrade houses first. The most efficient building levels post has a strategy on upgrading houses.
• If you really need the xp from the task to level up, box some decorations, take 10 seconds to build the house, collect the reward, bulldoze the house and put your decorations back. 30 seconds of work and you don’t have a useless house taking up space on your farm.

Level 40 -> cafe, meadow, and manufactory supply chain is unlocked. 

• There is a flashy large reward which makes it luring, but if you do the math, the right selection of farm buildings will make more money and provide a spin off of materials. The cafe is an invaluable resource and vital to your farm's growth, just not when they tell you to. The rewards go up every 10 player levels (not cafe level), and it isn’t till level 60 that the cafe starts to make sense.
• Did you catch the subtle hint? Want better rewards? Upgrade the cafe. Nope. Common misconception. Cafe rewards are based on player level. You don’t figure that out till after you spent your expansion supplies on upgrading the cafe.

New supply chains don’t stagger their introduction

• When the game unlocks a new animal, it unlocks a new crop, feed, stable and product all at once. There are 4 steps you need to take before you can sell the product in the market, yet the market asks for the product as soon as you reach the level. They are hoping you will speed things up by skipping process time or construction time with gold. Just trash the contracts and take your time to build the supply chain.
• The same happens with honey. You need a new resource - mallets - to upgrade your apples to 7, collect nectar, build the hive and process honey. The task however lists the beehive at the top, so you scratch and scramble to get mallets and build it first because the apple upgrade is ¾ the way down your list of tasks. But, you need more mallets to get your apples to 7 before you can produce nectar to make honey. So that beehive sits empty for a long time while you try to get the mallets to upgrade your apples (and fields). Start saving mallet making supplies, making/collecting mallets, upgrade your apples, collect nectar, trash honey contracts, use honey to get more mallets and be patient.  

Level 67 -> nectar and honey supply chain is unlocked. 

• Honey contracts are large and look beautiful, but for the next 5 levels you can't fill more than 11% of your honey contracts, which means 9% of your contracts now need to be trashed, making it much harder to earn funds in the market. Also, the best way to develop your honey supply chain is using honey, rather than selling it in contracts. Those big contracts on a cash strapped farm make it even harder to use honey to build up your supply chain rather than selling it. You will never be able to fill all honey contracts without buying ($$$) solutions.
• The game has a natural flow from “materials poor” to “cash poor” (level 50 ish) and back to “materials poor” (level 140 ish). Honey and sheep slow down your market and ability to make money while being cash poor. If you know this is coming, there are steps you can take to minimize the struggle and not become one of the many players that quit at level 69.
• Trust me when I say level 67 will hit you like a ton of bricks if you don’t know it is coming. You will need 14-18 workers and 800+ mallets.
• To prepare, you need to fish and save fillets early, add a meadow and manufactory between level 60 and 65, have your apples at level 6 and be ready to upgrade your apples to level 7 for nectar at level 67 before you build the beehive to process the nectar. You can even wait till level 70 to build the beehive.

Level 90 -> the tailor begins. 

• People assume the tailor is good for your farm because the contracts are massive, but there is not a single item the tailor produces that sells from more than the sum of its components. You lose money on every contract.  
• The tailor is there to make sure your farm loses money. It is only useful for hardcore players that need an edge in tournaments. You can use the tailor to buy player tournament points.

Level 100 -> sheep. 

• First game item that you cannot upgrade without spending money. You get the supplies (buckets) for level 1 in a quest; after that the “free” methods will take the average player a long time to gather (average of 800 premium - yes blue - dog bones for 10% increase in wool) or you can gamble for them, but you are 38 times more likely to get hit by lightning in your lifetime than win the materials you need. Technically it’s “free”. If you did win them/earn, I wouldn't spend them on sheep. A level 4 beehive or level 11 apple will make you much more money and materials.
• You will have the choice whether to build the first level of sheep and buy additional wool, or just buy the wool. You will be able to make an educated decision that is right for your farm and farming habits. 

Barnacle’s Ship 

• The ship offers farm cash, but it cuts into materials and the ability to feed your animals.

There are 29+ ways to buy gold. 

• The best will give 9 times more gold than the worst. If you spend $5, I want you to get 20,000 gold and not 2,250. And then I want you to use that 20,000 gold to get even more gold in the game.
• Many of the packages have identical names, but have different variations with different amounts of gold or materials. You want the best ones.
• Many game elements are cheaper to buy gold and then buy the material in game - orange tickets (not recommended), water tower blueprints, etc

There is no end to this game.  

• Everything just keeps increasing. You can max building if you are an avid fisherman and/or spend a fortune, but there is no final level to reach. You can be at the top, but the rewards do not come close to justifying the cost.  

You can buy xp flowers to basically buy levels of experience

• The huge problem is that you won’t acquire any of the materials or cash that you need for the upgrades and unlocks waiting for you at the next level. So, you also need to buy cash and materials or gold to truly get ahead faster.
• Your farm fares better long term if you just let it grow naturally and collect materials and resources along the way. There is little value in rushing to catch a carrot on a stick.

Tech support takes at least a week to respond and always tells you they can’t do that or fix it.

Tech support has shortened their response time, but is rarely helpful. Most people walk away feeling blamed.

• This is either a poorly supported game and overworked support team, or they intentionally delay hoping you suck it up and purchase to solve your problems. It is simply amazing what support remembers they can do when you give them a little pushback. 

The game wants you to spend a lot of farm cash upgrading buildings

• Stables have poor return on investment. If you work with the game flow of cash poor/material poor, you will only spend money on low return investments during the cash rich/material poor phase. Always expand when you can. An expansion will do more for your farm (and co-op) than 4 level 7 cows.

Big Farm put multipliers on co-op projects to give the bad ones more appeal

• Even at 5 times the points, Marvelous Muffins is still a pointless project. If you really want to spend money to buy co-op points, other projects without bonus will give you at least twice as many points as muffins with bonus, per dollar spent.

The tournament system will naturally increase in difficulty as you succeed until you can’t succeed any more. This is a trap many players fall into.

• Tournament levels have nothing to do with the farm level of the competition. It is all based on skill (and money is some cases). Many players and teams experience lots of success in the beginning and then get very discouraged and try to force or buy results when things get hard. Buying results perpetuates more buying; money spent with nothing to show for it a month later. If you truly understand the tournament system, you can use it to compete, relax and yield more rewards than continually banging your head against the ceiling.

The market does not match what your farm produces.  

• The common misconception is that the market is rigged against your farm. Perception can be fickle if you are looking for something in particular, but the market is fixed and predictable if you think of it as a long term statistical model.  
• Every item in the game has a fixed value when asked for in a contract. The size or composition of the contract has no impact on a product’s value. You can lose up to 60% of your potential income if you only process large contracts.

None of the key concepts in the game are explained in the tutorial and Big Farm has little support for players.

• Big Farm has a tiny little FAQ on their web page which is insufficient to farm efficiently. Their largest resource to help players is on how to buy packages. Some of the information they publish about their game is even incorrect. All of the resources for players are compiled by fans.  
• As a side note, be wary of these gaming blog tip sites where the person will post tips after playing the game for a day. (Most of them are copies of each other.) Some of the tips are horrible. Get your info from fans that actually play and understand the game.

Many more subtle little details.

That is why this site exists – to help you avoid the snares, enjoy a better gaming experience, and to spend because you want to, not because you feel you need to. I don’t want you to chase things that have little value*. I want you to build an efficient farm for you first, so that it will benefit you and your co-op in the long term. (Many people design their farms too co-op heavy and end up stunting their growth, making some of the bottleneck stages of the game even worse and hurting their co-op in the long run with a smaller farm and more frustrated farmer.) I want you to understand the dynamics and shifts of the game, what things are wise to focus on when and how to reshape your farm as it grows to maximize your growth and success. I want you to recognize when your co-op forgets you are a person and give you the courage to find a new group.

There are tons of resources already established to help you farm better and the site continues to grow every week. I had detailed cafe and outdated honey posts on Facebook and the old site that I am working on rewriting.

Happy Farming

Smart

*PS. My proof readers said “Wait a second, what things have little value?”. After pondering this, I’m going to do it in a separate post for the sake of site flow.